


call your name into the dark

by Prinzenhasserin



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Ghosts, Space Opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-02 01:28:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15786147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prinzenhasserin/pseuds/Prinzenhasserin
Summary: Sarah is probably way too enthusiastic about the crowns of the Skrull princess. It definitely leads to some strange sights, and scientific experiments...





	call your name into the dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rosencrantz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosencrantz/gifts).



Sarah stepped through the narrow walkway into the tower high above the botanical gardens of the spaceship, and couldn't help her delighted smile. That first view of the planet, suspended as they were on their broken apart spaceship, was breathtaking no matter the weather. Today, the rings of the transient planet were stark visible against the purple sky, and the sunlight crested over the windows  of the console tower to tickle her nose. Back when this spaceship housed the entire royal family of Skrull, this had been the command centre, as well as the entry into the personal chambers of the royals who had their private quarters stacked up in the tower, and even though the ship was now defunct after the radioactive explosion, it lost none of its splendour. She turned back to her group of tourists that she was guiding through the palace. Sarah had come in with the first research team after the initial decontamination had been dealt with, and as one of the members with the least qualifications, she was relegated to the duties the others liked least. Sarah didn't mind; she loved exploring the ruins and showing them to the interested passengers who tagged along on research cruises to see the world and maybe learn a bit of stuff, too.

This fortnight's tourists were delightfully interested. She let them enter her favourite of the royal chambers, and then continued her tour. The chambers were preserved exactly as they'd been during the time the royal family lived in them, which was unique and very exciting to students of anthropology such as her.

"This is my favourite place," she told them cheerfully, mentally dismissing the teenaged porg who was picking at his medusa coils. There was no reason to get upset about him being bored and rude, since he wasn't disturbing the rest of their group. And maybe she could even get him interested by mentioning the way the Skrull royal family dealt with their enemies— she turned around.

There was a person sitting on the dais of the window, dangling their feet in the air. Sarah managed to suppress her first instinct, which was to shout loudly about the sanctity of cultural heritage sites, and her second thought, which was to pull the person inside the tower that was not protected by a gravity well like the rest of the fragments of the palace gardens. The same eruption of matter that had killed the entire royal Skrull family had broken the spaceship "Nebula" apart, a tragedy that of course led to the salvaging and exploration as a heritage site. Sarah, who had been an avid fan of the maintenance of the so-called space junk had volunteered for the practical at the newly implemented heritage site— an outer space job opportunity was not something she could ever pass by.

She had quickly found her way into entertaining the tourist set, infecting them with the same sort of enthusiasm about the incredible feat of engineering that kept the spaceship floating along, mainly kept together by a single gravity device and many thoughts and prayers. Once she'd explored the gardens, she had found her favourite place— the parlour in which the Skrull princess had kept her crowns—the ones sculpted from the bones of her enemies. Over her long time alive—almost 10 times the life Sarah herself had lived, she had amassed quite the collection.

Sarah turned back around to her group. They didn't seem interested in the person at the windowsill, instead they were looking at the incredible delicate looking crowns. "Uh, Miss?" one of them asked. "Aren't you gonna talk about what those are?"

She sent another look at the window—but the presence had disappeared.

 

"Say," Sarah carefully ducked underneath the solar-sail that had just been erected, to get to the leader of the museum and her personal supervisor for weird things she found in the castle. That had been his words, "weird things." This was not the first time Sarah had reported something, but usually it was more culturally weird things, like the giant trap spider that had survived the nuclear blast.

Her supervisor was knee-deep in what looked like puke, but hopefully wasn't. She was briefly distracted from her question, before he looked up and asked, "Is there a problem, Sarah? Another radioactive spider?"

She quickly shook her head. "It was probably nothing. What is that substance?"

"Robert thinks it's puke," he answered cheerfully. Too cheerfully for a man standing in puke, in Sarah's opinion. But she was only working on her doctorate, so what did she know. "But I think it may be the fertiliser for the gardens. Could still be puke, of course. But rather unlikely. It's too finely ground for that."

"I'll take your word for it," Sarah said dubiously. Her supervisor back at the university had told her that this would be a learning experience for her, but somehow Sarah hadn't thought he meant stuff like this. "Anyway. I keep seeing this— optical illusion up on the tower."

"What kind of optical illusion?" he asked, and poked at the substance he was standing in. It bounced, like a particularly revolting jelly pudding. Sarah couldn't look away.

"Well," she tried to keep her thoughts from straying. "It might be a ghost? If I believed in ghosts. Which I do not, for the record. Haha."

"A ghost," her supervisor said. He didn't sound at all disbelieving, only mildly contemplative. "That's very interesting. Where have you seen it? Is it always at the same place? Does it look like a spectre, or more like a discoloration, or is it a fully formed image of a creature?"

"Uhh," Sarah said.

Her supervisor had that way of looking at her like she was an adorable duckling, who he had volunteered to teach to swim. "I have further reading of the effect nuclear fusion blasts have on living organisms, and there's quite a variety of ghosts they can create. Depending on which type of transdimensional image we have here, we can try to make it cross dimensions again—in practical effects that would mean bringing a member of the spaceship crew back to life."

"I didn't know you could do that," Sarah said.

Her supervisor laughed. "Someone didn't do the reading, then! It's quite clearly laid out in "Discrete Structures of Space Warp," and that's still mandatory for all highschool graduates, isn't it?"

Sarah had, in fact, read Discrete Structures of Space Warp," but it was almost entirely written in mathematical code. It didn't lend itself to understanding whatever was in it. Her teacher hadn't seemed like they had understood it either. "Yes," Sarah said. "It's still mandatory reading. But I don't think I remember the exact passage...?"

Her supervisor clearly had a memory chip implanted, because he started reciting the exact passage. It didn't help her understanding, and only made her eyes glaze over. "Okay, I remember now," she interrupted his declaration. She was going to read up in her  "Thank you so much— so what should I do, about the ghost?"

"That depends what type it is, didn't you say you remember?"

"It changed, though," Sarah said. "At first, it was more like a mirage, a trick of the light. But then I started seeing it— her, i guess—more frequently."

"Ahh, that's lucky," her supervisor said. "The ghost is finding their own way back. You should continue whatever you've been doing. Now, be a dear, get me Robert. He may be onto something with his puke idea."

Sarah couldn't help her wide-eyed grimace, and hurried away from the area to somewhere where there wasn't, well. Her supervisor's advice of "Keep doing whatever you've been doing," was also not exactly helpful, when she didn't know what she was doing, at all. She stopped by the cantina, where she found Robert and told him the boss wanted to see him, and then made her way to the library. It was only makeshift, as they couldn't get the permits for a proper data channel into the servers of the university, and had to make do with half the usual research stuff. Most of their money didn't come in with research grants, of course—most of their money came in from space tourists, who wanted to take a look at the royal wreck, the spaceship that took down the Skrull Empire. 

Of course, now that she had identified her cause of action, the ghostly figure of the princess didn't appear at all. She went through all the standard books on transdimensional hoppings—of which there were much less than her advisor had made it seem, and then, when that didn't produce any results, she went through them again.

Then, she went to Robert to complain about her ghost disappearing.

"Well," Robert said. "You started researching, and stopped whatever you did before you noticed your ghost. Perhaps what you were doing was helping more?"

"That doesn't make sense," Sarah said. "What a ridiculous hypothesis." She did not, however, read her research books a third time, and went with one of the tourist groups that had come in to wax poetically about the crowns, the Skrull royalty, and Masmardaji in particular.

Funnily enough, just as she entered the ship's tower, she could see the translucent figure appearing in front of her. She continued her regular scheduled tour—but she was distracted to see the faintly glimmering outline get more tangible and real every minute.

Perhaps Robert's advice had something to it.

 

Now, the ghost was immediately recognisable as a skrull—wearing one of the crowns that Sarah had seen in person, and a dress made out of material that looked much like the solar sails did. A shimmering material of light-absorbing and light-reflecting material, made even stranger by the faint etheral glowing of a being phasing between the time-space-continuum. If her math classes had demonstrated the possibility of meeting ghosts, Sarah would probably have paid more attention.

"Hi?" Sarah said, and probably stared a little too obvious. The Princess—Masmardaji, as Sarah had found out on her brief discourse to the library's datapacks— was even more stunning in person. Or well, as an etheral being, hanging about in space. Her long appendages of hair curled around her head, her teeth were sharp and very pointy, and her eyes-- they were mesmerising. "This is my first haunting," she told the princess. "I'm not actually certain about what I'm doing. But if I am really the only person who can see you, then the task falls to me, obviously."

"You could just leave me here," Masmardaji said. Her mouth had opened, so Sarah knew it had to come from her, but there was a strange disconnect between what she was actually mouthing, and what Sarah was hearing—and Masmardaji didn't even have a physical voice box currently. Sarah was sure this was all perfectly according to higher mathematics, but that didn't make it any less eerie—might have made it more so, actually. Masmardaji's voice was low, and a bit rough, as if she had spent the last year in a rift between universes.

"No," Sarah said, because if there was one thing she knew for certain, was that she could not leave this person, so similar and yet alien, alone in the dark for much longer. There was no way she wouldn't try her very best to continue doing whatever she had to help. "I couldn't. I would never forgive myself. Besides, you have to teach me how those crowns are made, they're awesome."

Masmardaji laughed. It sounded scratchy, like a shipdoor opening after a long trip through hyperspace, but it transformed her face into something fully human. Sarah was mesmerised. "I've watched you with them," she said finally.

"Oh?" Sarah said, and couldn't help the feeling of dread well up in her. What if she had made some terrible faux pas? 

"I like how you handle them. They look good in your hands," Masmardaji said. She blinked, as if something had caught in her eye. 

"You do?" Sarah asked. Was this a Skrull thing she didn't know about? "I hope I didn't overstepped any cultural norms," she added, because she'd been worried about that since realising the royal family—or at least their princess—would hopefully manage to cross over into their plane of existence again.

"Oh, you definitely did," Masmardaji said, very cheerfully. 

Sarah felt her neck warm and sweat drip down her temples. "Really?" she said, a bit choked up.

"Yes, but it's not like you did so intentionally. You did offer me your hand in marriage, though." Masmardaji laughed at her expression. "I won't hold you to it, but it was very flattering!" She moved on of her hands behind her ears, and tucked back one of her very colourful antennas. 

Sarah wanted to sink into the floor in embarrassment. When the image of Masmardaji became more translucent, however, she managed to get over herself. "Wait," she said, and her hand grasped thin air as the princess had vanished again.

 

There was only one thing that would extend their interactions with each other. There was just the tiny problem that there wasn't exactly much scientific research that went into crossing the boundaries between planes—because usually it resulted in the death of the person trying to cross. The only successful transfers had been when the person crossing was already a ghost— and they'd cross over in the same place of the space-time-continuum, which was another thing that was awfully hard to arrange. Luckily, all variables pointed towards a success at the moment.

"It's a kiss," Robert told her.

Sarah must have made some incredulous face at him, because he threw up his hands and defended his words, "I know! I know! It's ridiculous. They're not even sure why kisses work the best, but we do have texts and myths from thousands of years of history, and they do support the theory. There's something energetically charged in a kiss—it transcends worlds, apparently, whatever that means. But everyone is reasonably sure it's going to work."

"Reasonably sure!" Sarah repeated, upset, then actually pondered over the words he was saying. This was not the point in time to get upset over the smaller trivia. "How am I supposed to kiss a translucent, etheral figure?"

Robert raises both of his eyebrows. "It's a kiss. How do you usually kiss people? Just do that, if it doesn't work then you can freak out about it later."

That was, of course, very unhelpful advice, but Robert generally was a very unhelpful sort of person. 

"I can't just kiss the royal princess!" she hissed. "It's just not done! There's an etiquette to it, and I'm just a lowly commoner!"

Robert rolled his eyes, as if he knew anything better than her. "It's not like she's the princess right now," he pointed out. "I think the foremost attribute she should be worried about is that she's a ghost. It's really rather fortunate that it's you who managed to connect to her enough that she could find a way back—that way the rest of us can operate the "

Of course, Sarah couldn't admit that he might have had a point. She did, however, stop arguing, and prepared for her next tour.

At the beginning of her tour, she greeted her guided group. "—and in case we encounter an important phenomenon, I'm going to give you this sign," and she waggles her hand in the spacer sign language of exit, "after which you will need to proceed back down to the botanical gardens where you may remain until your shuttles pick you up again. Questions?"

A pudgy looking teenager snapped up their arm in a gesture Sarah hadn't seen since her primary education. 

"Yes?" Sarah asked mildly, without pointing out that they weren't in school.

"What happens if we don't go back to the gardens?"

"Then we can't be liable if another radioactive incident happens to befall you. But don't worry, the exits are marked clearly, and your communication devices are updated with the latest navigation programs!" Sarah didn't forget to smile very cheerfully at the collective group, and ignored the worried faces and invited them to follow her along on her tour.

Just like her advisor had predicted, the ghost of princess Masmardaji made its appearance during the routine of her guided tour again. Sarah was very flattered to have her reappearance—she hadn't believed her nattering had had anything of value to add, but apparently it really had been the reason the ghost had been appearing more and more. She wouldn't mind kissing someone who appreciated her work, even if it was something the other, more valuable scientists looked down on.

She wouldn't mind kissing Masmardaji in particular, because, looking back, she almost felt like the ghost was flirting with her. Of course, nothing would come of it, Sarah knew exactly how she was, and that was obsessed with other cultures and otherwise rather unremarkable. She was never the smartest, nor the prettiest, nor even the most well-read person in the room, and really, what else was there?

But Masmardaji appeared like a shiny beacon on the top floor of the tower, and Sarah ushered her group outside again, hoping to do this in private, with only the researchers watching. 

"Hey," Sarah said, proving once and for all that she was very smooth about this entire thing.

"You're here again!" Masmardaji greeted her with enthusiasm. It was emotionally very satisfying, even though Sarah was sure that as soon as the princess had the ability to explore beyond the reaches of the universe again, she'd forget boring old her— but as of right now, she should concentrate on making sure Masmardaji had the ability to explore the rest of the universe.

"I hope—" Sarah started and then had to clear her throat. Why had nobody thought to prepare her about speaking to an undead princess she had to kiss for reasons? "That is," she tried again, but fully formed sentences didn't want to leave her mouth.

"What is it?" Masmardaji asked her. She was getting bigger, more clear—Sarah had to swallow. Two ghostly hands enveloped her face— they were cool and very gentle. Sarah felt herself blush even more. "Are you okay?" the princess asked her.

"Yes!" Sarah shouted, and then wanted to sink into the ground again. "That is, I am fine! Would you like to kiss?" She felt like a teenager again, a stuttery mess full of dramatic feelings, and it's certainly not helped by the fact that she hoped the kiss would manage to cross planes of existences. It was strange in and of itself.

Luckily for her, Masmardaji seemed delighted by her inexpert proposal. "A kiss?" she asked, gleefully. "Of course! For a person that enthusiastic about my crowns I could do no less." 

Sarah stared into her eyes—they were shimmering with an energy she couldn't quite place and even though they were clear, her eyes were as real as Sarah's. She felt the pressure on her lips; a kiss. She couldn't look—what if they were wrong, what if this wasn't helping, what if this made things worse—

and then, something shifted. Somehow, what had felt so real before was more substantial, the pressure, the smell. Sarah opened her eyes again. Before she could see Masmardaji as a pale figure, but now she was as colourful as the crowns behind her. Her hands felt warm, suddenly, and Sarah forgot to breathe. 

Sarah could feel Masmardaji press closer. Sarah couldn't get enough of her, either, and pulled her in, not even thinking about the possible ettiquette involved in kissing a princess. She felt her heart beating again underneath her fingers, the pulse travelling through their mouths, and a warmth that was spreading. 

Sarah gasped— Masmardaji let her breathe and nosed along her neck, then set a soft kiss on her collarbone.

"Thank you," she said softly. "That almost felt like it was real."

"Oh, wow! It really worked!" Robert interrupted from the doorway. "Welcome back from the dead, Your Royal Highness."

He was followed by the twelve other researchers of their team, who couldn't help their excitement over getting one of the royals back from their terrible fate. There was much rejoicing. It saved Sarah from the awkward conversation of telling the person you just kissed that they were, in fact, alive now, and not a ghost anymore. It didn't save her from the awkwardness of Robert interrupting a romantic moment, but since they would have many more in the future, that was alright.

For right now, the only thing they needed to be doing, was saving the rest of the Skrull royal family— but that was par for the course for a science team as lucky as they were. Sarah just knew one thing: She wasn't going to kiss any of the others into life again.


End file.
